In the last 2 weeks, I took a 3-day trip to visit friends in Arizona, I attended a productive meeting of my artist’s critique group, I went to a really fun art opening–the juried show I’m in at San Diego’s Museum of the Living Artist, and I made progress on three large paintings.
One of the photos from my Arizona road trip:
Gorgeous sunset in the Mojave desert.
An inspiring critique session with my artist’s group:
North County Painters Critique Group, August 2014 meeting. Art by Daniel Ketelhut.
The art opening at the San Diego Museum of the Living Artist in Balboa Park:
The museum is an impressive, beautiful space!
Even though I arrived late for the opening, the place was packed!
I tried to get a close-up photo of myself with my painting, but I never got an opportunity because there was a constant stream of people stopping and looking at it. This is a good problem to have.
This is the closest I could get.
Me with my date. Isn’t he cute?
I admired a lot of artwork and truly enjoyed the grandeur of the large, open museum floor.
Here are some of the other walls of artwork in the current show. Clearly I am in good company!
And, I have to say, San Diego’s Balboa Park in the evening is truly a magical experience.
The show is up until September 20th, and admission is only $3. If you’re local, check it out!
In the studio, I’m working on three 32″ square paintings simultaneously, and doing a lot of thick palette knife painting experimentation. Here’s a super-quick time-lapse of me working on one of the new pieces in the studio:
I hope to have something finished up and photographed in the next week.
It’s been an insanely busy month for me…and, on top of it all, I also experienced a massive hard drive failure!
Last week, my computer, where I keep all my business and personal files from the past 15 years, suddenly exhibited the Blue Screen of Death. It quickly became clear that the hard drive was a goner, and everything on it was lost forever.
I cannot even tell you how thankful I am that backups are something I take very seriously. I use CrashPlan–but at the time of this crash, only 70% of my files had been backed up on CrashPlan’s servers–see, I recently deleted all my backups there and started a fresh backup. The reason the hard drive blew up is it was a pretty new drive that I’d recently purchased and moved my files to. There hadn’t yet been enough time since starting over with my new drive for my enormous amount of data to be copied over to my CrashPlan backup. Turns out the new drive was defective and unstable from the start.
The thing that saved me from losing 30% of my data was that I back up my files in multiple locations. In addition to using CrashPlan, I also run an automatic backup to a local drive in my home. In the end, I lost only about a week’s worth of files, plus the cost of a new hard drive and motherboard. This is an inconvenience to be sure, but nothing at all compared to what it would have been like to lose all my files from 15 years, or even one year. I can’t even imagine the devastation I would have felt.
Let this be a lesson: Back up everything, then back up your backups, then have a backup backup plan. Whatever time and money it takes now to set up automatic backup systems will be worth it if this ever happens to you.
